I suspect this will be somewhat of a bittersweet “careful what you wish for” outcome - once Chrome is on iOS properly we will see “Your browser is unsupported” messages, pointing people towards Chrome and the other engines won’t keep a meaningful marketshare. 🫤
Considering EU rules on vendor self-preference, I suspect Google will need to vastly reduce how much they push Chrome. As for 3rd parties pushing people towards Chrome, if that becomes too much, we’ll need further legal action.
Every google property has pushed chrome to every non-chrome user for a decade, they even brag about deciding to kill IE versions by having their properties drop support, and the EU did not care. The EU has never demonstrably cared about how google prioritizes their own browser despite deliberating removing basic privacy features from webkit from day 1. Only now they’ve got tracking information on the majority of sites on the web and successfully undermined third party cookie blocking are they talking about doing something they explicitly removed from webkit, and they’re marketing it as if it were equivalent to the systems Mozilla and Apple introduced in response to Google’s extensive invasion of user privacy.
And yet the EU does nothing.
I think anyone thinking the EU will do anything that stops Google’s ongoing abuse is kidding themselves.
They certainly have more than sufficient internal resources to do so, it wouldn’t surprise me if they do it just so they can stick another finger towards Apple, if you know what I mean.
Reading the actual requirements to get the entitlement, I’m not sure it does? Apple won’t give you permission to be a 3rd-party web browser unless you block third party cookies by default and do origin-partitioned storage. You’re also not allowed to “sync cookies and state between the browser and any other apps, even other apps of the developer” - I’m a little unclear on what this means honestly. (Like, would that prevent Google from using your synced Chrome history in other Google apps…?)
They clearly still have some levers to pull, or at least think they do.
For the latter point I think it is “you can’t use the browser state to communicate with other apps” not “a user can’t use the same account with multiple apps”. e.g. the goal is to make it so that if you use the YouTube app and chrome but aren’t logged into the same account on both google can’t just use on device channels to link the app user information to the browser user information. If the user explicitly chooses to log in to the same account in both then they’ve done that themselves manually.
It’s probably worth it to Google purely as a wedge. Once it’s built and working on EU iPhones, Google has the easy argument to other regulators that only Apple is holding back Chrome on iPhone at that point.
They already did. There is an iOS native version of Chromium living in their code repository. Probably far from complete and now they have to make it work with the new APIs that Apple just published. But they have been working on it for sure.
A quick search turned up some data suggesting that there may be over 100M iOS App Store users in the EU. Is that a large enough set of users for Google to want to invest? All based on assumption, but I’d think they’d look at revenue per Chrome user and compounding revenue from installations of other Google apps by these users.
Based on this bug, they’ve already started work some time ago on getting Blink running on iOS. I think it’s just a matter of time for it to be ported and the default experience as they’ve got years of cross-platform experience. How successful it’ll be is different matter.
If you recall when the blink for started there were some articles about how they’d removed millions of lines of “apple code”. What they’d removed was all the platform abstraction logic, the qt, gtk, wx, etc ports, and javascriptcore (with its support for more or less every platform, alongside the optimising JITs for armv7, armv8, x86, x86_64, MIPs, SH4, ….). Since then they’ve aggressively removed most of the other abstraction layers.
That said, I can’t imagine they haven’t had some kind of build on jailbroken phones.
iOS and Apple are far less popular compared to the US though. Sure, they’re still a major phone vendor, but whereas in the US they have a 55-60% market share, in Europe they’re closer to 30-35%.
Still, that translate to similar numbers of actual iPhone users (200-240 million each).
I would frankly be surprised if they haven’t had Chrome running on iOS internally for years just to be ready to respond immediately to an Apple policy change.
The merits (or lack thereof) of this decision by Apple aside, for technical reasons I hope that the next target is Chromium and Google’s control over the browser market.
Because even if you don’t like WebKit on iOS, Google has been not-so-quietly making things worse for everyone that uses a Chromium based browser. We need competition, but not just in the tiny iPhone market, we need it everywhere: there can never be “one browser to rule them all….”
This truly is malicious compliance. The new rules are going to make it unnecessarily tough to perform real-world tests of my website on these browsers that I can’t access. I really wish the US would enforce similar requirements to allow for all browser engines.
When I’m working on my website, I normally target Firefox since that’s what I use. I’ll occasionally check it out on Chrome, but I have found that Firefox and Chrome generally map one-to-one with their standards. Safari is frequently an outlier, and while content is never totally butchered, I have found a number instances where it didn’t display my document in the way I had intended. I try to avoid doing the following (because good design generally avoids it), but I have had to add non-standard css features such as “::-webkit-scrollbar”[0] to fix these issues when they go against what I’m trying to implement. Fortunately, I have an iPhone to test this out, but it’s less than ideal and requires an Apple device like you said.
I wonder if Apple will allow alternative browser engines in the simulator worldwide. In that way developers could test websites without getting other browser engines outside the EU.
I don’t use Apple products, but I read their PR release about this and some of the documentation, and what strikes me is the tone of utter contempt in which they managed to write the entire thing.
The problem here is that this is contempt literally towards (a subset of) their users. If you find yourself in this subset, why continue to give money to a company that clearly hates what you want to do?
Not at all! I’m specifically talking about the people who do read this, do care about this problem and so on. Why would they still buy Apple stuff after this?
If they cared about this problem, why would they have bought Apple products before this?
I think honestly the amount of people who care about this enough to not buy Apple are simply a market Apple doesn’t want to serve or Apple has determined it to be sufficiently small not to worry about it.
That said, this type of stuff is exactly why I left the Apple ecosystem in the 2000s, where they were doing the same things to a lesser extent to competitors for Cocoa/Obj-C on their computers.
I loathe what Apple is doing right now, but switching to something else is simply not practical for me. I’ve been in the Apple ecosystem since 2008. At this point, migrating to Android/Windows will take me months of effort, cost a lot of money, and lead to a ton of lost productivity. I’m not even sure I’ll be able to find Android and Windows equivalents of the software I use regularly on iOS and macOS.
Things are complicated further by the fact that I live in India. Over here, you can just walk into an Apple Store or reseller and buy anything Apple makes. That’s not true for other manufacturers. I briefly owned a ThinkPad X1 some time ago, which had to be shipped to me from Singapore. I ended up paying quite a bit of premium over the retail price for that one. Some brands — like Framework and System76 — are simply not available here, and never will be. Others have a limited selection of devices. Even the Microsoft Surface line costs more in India than it does in Western countries.
So I’m pretty much stuck with Apple, unless I go through a laborious, expensive process to migrate. I’ve attempted a migration several times in the past, but there have always been hiccups. I might try again in the future when I have more time and energy, but I’m not very optimistic at the moment.
I expect Apple’s response would be “don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out”. Apple are nothing if not opinionated, and they’ve always been quite happy to tell users their car can be any color they want, as long as it’s black.
Exactly, I don’t care about Apple’s “response” (none), but I find it intriguing that people aware of this buy products from a company that is openly hostile. I’m talking about this particular group of buyers, not about the company
To answer the question though, I expect the answer to “why buy Apple when they do X shit” is a combination of 1) all the other companies do X too (see: Samsung removing headphone jacks), and 2) none of the companies do what Apple does (e.g. UI polish) that comes from being opinionated. Not counting the cultists, of course.
I suspect this will be somewhat of a bittersweet “careful what you wish for” outcome - once Chrome is on iOS properly we will see “Your browser is unsupported” messages, pointing people towards Chrome and the other engines won’t keep a meaningful marketshare. 🫤
Considering EU rules on vendor self-preference, I suspect Google will need to vastly reduce how much they push Chrome. As for 3rd parties pushing people towards Chrome, if that becomes too much, we’ll need further legal action.
Every google property has pushed chrome to every non-chrome user for a decade, they even brag about deciding to kill IE versions by having their properties drop support, and the EU did not care. The EU has never demonstrably cared about how google prioritizes their own browser despite deliberating removing basic privacy features from webkit from day 1. Only now they’ve got tracking information on the majority of sites on the web and successfully undermined third party cookie blocking are they talking about doing something they explicitly removed from webkit, and they’re marketing it as if it were equivalent to the systems Mozilla and Apple introduced in response to Google’s extensive invasion of user privacy.
And yet the EU does nothing.
I think anyone thinking the EU will do anything that stops Google’s ongoing abuse is kidding themselves.
The rules I’m talking about are part of the DMA, the ones that start applying in a few weeks.
[Comment removed by author]
Will Google really put in the effort to port Chrome just for the EU? I’m skeptical.
They certainly have more than sufficient internal resources to do so, it wouldn’t surprise me if they do it just so they can stick another finger towards Apple, if you know what I mean.
Given it lets them control tracking within the browser regardless of what Apple allows through Safari APIs, yes I rather suspect they would do.
Reading the actual requirements to get the entitlement, I’m not sure it does? Apple won’t give you permission to be a 3rd-party web browser unless you block third party cookies by default and do origin-partitioned storage. You’re also not allowed to “sync cookies and state between the browser and any other apps, even other apps of the developer” - I’m a little unclear on what this means honestly. (Like, would that prevent Google from using your synced Chrome history in other Google apps…?)
They clearly still have some levers to pull, or at least think they do.
For the latter point I think it is “you can’t use the browser state to communicate with other apps” not “a user can’t use the same account with multiple apps”. e.g. the goal is to make it so that if you use the YouTube app and chrome but aren’t logged into the same account on both google can’t just use on device channels to link the app user information to the browser user information. If the user explicitly chooses to log in to the same account in both then they’ve done that themselves manually.
It’s probably worth it to Google purely as a wedge. Once it’s built and working on EU iPhones, Google has the easy argument to other regulators that only Apple is holding back Chrome on iPhone at that point.
They already did. There is an iOS native version of Chromium living in their code repository. Probably far from complete and now they have to make it work with the new APIs that Apple just published. But they have been working on it for sure.
The Chrome only mobile web is coming.
A quick search turned up some data suggesting that there may be over 100M iOS App Store users in the EU. Is that a large enough set of users for Google to want to invest? All based on assumption, but I’d think they’d look at revenue per Chrome user and compounding revenue from installations of other Google apps by these users.
Based on this bug, they’ve already started work some time ago on getting Blink running on iOS. I think it’s just a matter of time for it to be ported and the default experience as they’ve got years of cross-platform experience. How successful it’ll be is different matter.
Would it be so hard a port? Clearly webkit already runs for safari. I know they renamed their fork of webkit, but it’s stil gonna be 90% the same…
It’s incredibly different at this point.
If you recall when the blink for started there were some articles about how they’d removed millions of lines of “apple code”. What they’d removed was all the platform abstraction logic, the qt, gtk, wx, etc ports, and javascriptcore (with its support for more or less every platform, alongside the optimising JITs for armv7, armv8, x86, x86_64, MIPs, SH4, ….). Since then they’ve aggressively removed most of the other abstraction layers.
That said, I can’t imagine they haven’t had some kind of build on jailbroken phones.
That would contribute to their revenue. I doubt they would let it slip through their fingers.
There’s a lot more people in the EU than in the US, so I suspect the answer is yes
iOS and Apple are far less popular compared to the US though. Sure, they’re still a major phone vendor, but whereas in the US they have a 55-60% market share, in Europe they’re closer to 30-35%.
Still, that translate to similar numbers of actual iPhone users (200-240 million each).
I would frankly be surprised if they haven’t had Chrome running on iOS internally for years just to be ready to respond immediately to an Apple policy change.
that might be an impetus for further EU regulations.
The merits (or lack thereof) of this decision by Apple aside, for technical reasons I hope that the next target is Chromium and Google’s control over the browser market.
Because even if you don’t like WebKit on iOS, Google has been not-so-quietly making things worse for everyone that uses a Chromium based browser. We need competition, but not just in the tiny iPhone market, we need it everywhere: there can never be “one browser to rule them all….”
This truly is malicious compliance. The new rules are going to make it unnecessarily tough to perform real-world tests of my website on these browsers that I can’t access. I really wish the US would enforce similar requirements to allow for all browser engines.
This is exactly what I feel by not owning any Apple device…
When I’m working on my website, I normally target Firefox since that’s what I use. I’ll occasionally check it out on Chrome, but I have found that Firefox and Chrome generally map one-to-one with their standards. Safari is frequently an outlier, and while content is never totally butchered, I have found a number instances where it didn’t display my document in the way I had intended. I try to avoid doing the following (because good design generally avoids it), but I have had to add non-standard css features such as “::-webkit-scrollbar”[0] to fix these issues when they go against what I’m trying to implement. Fortunately, I have an iPhone to test this out, but it’s less than ideal and requires an Apple device like you said.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/::-webkit-scrollbar
I wonder if Apple will allow alternative browser engines in the simulator worldwide. In that way developers could test websites without getting other browser engines outside the EU.
I don’t use Apple products, but I read their PR release about this and some of the documentation, and what strikes me is the tone of utter contempt in which they managed to write the entire thing.
The problem here is that this is contempt literally towards (a subset of) their users. If you find yourself in this subset, why continue to give money to a company that clearly hates what you want to do?
I think you’re overestimating the proportion of Apple consumers who read the company’s press releases.
Not at all! I’m specifically talking about the people who do read this, do care about this problem and so on. Why would they still buy Apple stuff after this?
If they cared about this problem, why would they have bought Apple products before this?
I think honestly the amount of people who care about this enough to not buy Apple are simply a market Apple doesn’t want to serve or Apple has determined it to be sufficiently small not to worry about it.
That said, this type of stuff is exactly why I left the Apple ecosystem in the 2000s, where they were doing the same things to a lesser extent to competitors for Cocoa/Obj-C on their computers.
I loathe what Apple is doing right now, but switching to something else is simply not practical for me. I’ve been in the Apple ecosystem since 2008. At this point, migrating to Android/Windows will take me months of effort, cost a lot of money, and lead to a ton of lost productivity. I’m not even sure I’ll be able to find Android and Windows equivalents of the software I use regularly on iOS and macOS.
Things are complicated further by the fact that I live in India. Over here, you can just walk into an Apple Store or reseller and buy anything Apple makes. That’s not true for other manufacturers. I briefly owned a ThinkPad X1 some time ago, which had to be shipped to me from Singapore. I ended up paying quite a bit of premium over the retail price for that one. Some brands — like Framework and System76 — are simply not available here, and never will be. Others have a limited selection of devices. Even the Microsoft Surface line costs more in India than it does in Western countries.
So I’m pretty much stuck with Apple, unless I go through a laborious, expensive process to migrate. I’ve attempted a migration several times in the past, but there have always been hiccups. I might try again in the future when I have more time and energy, but I’m not very optimistic at the moment.
Sounds like sunk cost fallacy. Better late than never.
Saying “it will cost money to replace and there are no good alternatives” doesn’t actually sound like that.
I expect Apple’s response would be “don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out”. Apple are nothing if not opinionated, and they’ve always been quite happy to tell users their car can be any color they want, as long as it’s black.
Exactly, I don’t care about Apple’s “response” (none), but I find it intriguing that people aware of this buy products from a company that is openly hostile. I’m talking about this particular group of buyers, not about the company
To answer the question though, I expect the answer to “why buy Apple when they do X shit” is a combination of 1) all the other companies do X too (see: Samsung removing headphone jacks), and 2) none of the companies do what Apple does (e.g. UI polish) that comes from being opinionated. Not counting the cultists, of course.
It’s really amazing to me how many people fail to understand this title is actually saying “this web page is best viewed in chrome”.
Disagreed. I don’t think these kinds of decisions should be regulated by governments. I think the European union made a costly mistake.
[Comment removed by moderator pushcx: Snarfy one-offs about politics don't start good conversations. Please don't do this here.]
I mean, this is what it looks like when you don’t get it right the first time. Improve stuff and learn from your mistakes.
Can’t say that inaction would lead to the ideal outcome here, really.